Siri Hustvedt Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit — unconscious and conscious.

Siri Hustvedt
There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

Siri Hustvedt
I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

Siri Hustvedt
Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber - teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.

Siri Hustvedt
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Siri Hustvedt
Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Siri Hustvedt
Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

Siri Hustvedt
Libraries are sexual dream factories. The languor brings it on.

Siri Hustvedt
Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.

Siri Hustvedt
In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

Siri Hustvedt
The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

Siri Hustvedt
The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

Siri Hustvedt
Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

Siri Hustvedt
There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.

Siri Hustvedt
Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

Siri Hustvedt
I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

Siri Hustvedt
Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader's skull and heart.

Siri Hustvedt
That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.

Siri Hustvedt
Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end.

Siri Hustvedt
A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Siri Hustvedt
Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

Siri Hustvedt
Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.

Siri Hustvedt
I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Siri Hustvedt
Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.

Siri Hustvedt
We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.

Siri Hustvedt